Not exactly a library issue, but one which rests on the same ideals.

It seems urgent to me that we legalize making video recordings of on-duty police officers. (Only illegal in some states.)

You will probably be hearing more about Weibo, a Chinese social networking site that combines aspects of Twitter and Facebook and presently has, at a minimum, 140 million users, which is nearly three times the user base of Twitter.

The interesting news at present is that the Chinese government, which shut down access to Twitter some time ago, has sent out mass messages on Weibo warning people that two recent posts were false. Here are accounts of the story from The Atlantic and The New York Times. My friend Anne Mostad-Jensen, a user of the site, sent me this screenshot of the government’s notice on the site (though if you can read Chinese, chances are you’ve already seen it).

Some of my colleagues in the Progressive Librarians Guild used to complain that Banned Books Week was an unfortunate distraction from the greater problem of a propagandistic media system. I shared that view and still do, but it is not the objection that I want to explain today.

My problem with Banned Books Week is one that is probably shared by some conservatives, and it has to do with the loose definition of what a “banned book” is, and what a “challenged book” is. Over time, as I have come to understand my own politics better, I have realized that what I care about is rational discourse as the basis for a democratic society. In rational discourse, as I see it, it is important to be clear about what you are actually saying, to ask critical questions with a patience for detail, and to reject strategic communication and to minimize rhetoric. The Banned Books Week project, well-intended as it may be, is a propaganda exercise that fails to model good standards for democratic communication.

Here is what I mean.

The history of book banning is a history of inspiring stories, stories of mass suppression of ideas, copies of books collected so that they can be burned, publishers incarcerated, often ultimately to no avail as the power of an idea proved greater than the power of the state or of a fascistic party. Book banning, good people agree, should be fought against, and is a source of inspiration to fight for what is right. Banned Books Week taps into people’s response to these historical narratives and aims to prevent the suppression of ideas from recurring. A noble intention and a narrative resource.

The problem that I see with Banned Books Week is that what counts as a “banned book” is actually a “challenged book,” and what counts as a challenged book is something quite different from an effort to prevent a book from being published, sold, or even made available in a library. Most of the cases of challenged books that are reported as a part of Banned Books Week are cases where a parent of a child objects to a book being a part of their child’s school curriculum, or at other times in the school’s library, on the grounds of “age appropriateness.” Defenders of intellectual freedom, to my dismay, have an unwritten policy of never addressing the question of age appropriateness, leaving it as an unstated assumption that anything selected for the curriculum by educators as opposed to by parents is automatically age-appropriate, as though educators are incapable of error.

School districts have policies in place for reviewing challenges to books on the basis of age-appropriateness. Challenged books are reviewed and evaluated by committees that are charged with that responsibility, and then the school district makes an official decision regarding the book. Regardless of what the school’s decision turns out to be, regardless of its reasonableness or unreasonableness, and regardless of the objectivity or bias within the decision-making process in a specific case, all challenges to a book by a parent get counted as an attempt at book banning.

Personally, I agree with intellectual freedom orthodoxy that says that one family should not have the right to determine what other students are taught, and this is part of what public education is. But when a book is challenged and reviewed on the grounds of age-appropriateness, it is ultimately not the family that brought the challenge that makes the decision. The decision is made by the educational institution itself. We can hope that more often than not these decisions are well-informed and based more on educational psychology than they are on pressure from an ideological community group. They may not always be. But the decision about whether a book should remain a part of the curriculum or not is ultimately made by the public institution that put the book in the curriculum in the first place, which means that book challenges happen as a part of a process that the institution puts in place in order to get feedback from the community on the curriculum. (In some other areas, we on the left are fighting for more opportunities to influence local policies to meet local needs.)

What I want to emphasize about this is that the “book banning” that is the subject of Banned Books Week is not book banning as we understand it historically but part of the cultural fight over the school curriculum. Now, I am prepared to fight hard to keep rationality and science and humanism in the school curriculum, against the theocrats who seem to be making incredible progress in rolling back not only 20th century liberalism but the values behind the Constitution itself (i.e. secular democracy). But in fighting that fight over the curriculum, what I am ultimately fighting for is rational discourse as opposed to irrationality. If I give up basic standards of rational discourse and resort to strategic communication and propaganda… well, as we said about Al Qaida during the debate over the PATRIOT Act: “They have won.”

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is coming to the defense of biologist Charles Monnett, who is being hounded by the Interior Department because of a 2006 publication that communicated alarming news about the effects of global warming on a polar bear population. Since the publication was in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and the investigators have not raised any specific questions about its scientific validity it seems to be an effort to suppress a finding for political reasons. Read more on the website of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Thanks to Fred Stoss for sharing this information.

At my university, there is a group of student tour guides who give tours of the campus to prospective students and their families. The library is included in their tour, and it is often amusing to listen to the misinformation about the library that they sometimes include. We periodically provide updated information, and the tour guides are trained each year, but errors are always present and we accept them with good humor.

What was harder to chuckle about not long ago was overhearing a tour guide give an explanation of the reference desk followed by an explanation of the nearby “Media Hub.” It went something like this:

(Spoken in a sad tone): “Over there is the reference desk where there is a librarian who can, um, help students find things to use for their research papers and things, and they are experts in different subject areas … There is a reference desk on each floor.” (In our building with four floors, there is Circulation and some student technology help on the first floor, reference on the second, student technology help on the third, and nobody on the fourth.)

“Moving over this way, that is the Media Hub, which is self-explanatory.”

Self-explanatory?

It seems to me that we’re getting our message out okay regarding what we do, but most students here don’t connect to the service we are providing once they hear us describe it. It seems to me that overworked faculty members are not scrutinizing students’ papers to the point where the students would see any need for our help. So we say, “We can help you get a better grade,” but I think that from the students’ point of view it is hard to see how we could possibly do that, given the more immediate obstacles to better grades that they experience. There are exceptions, of course, and most days those are enough…

Noted as an example of what I think can be called political censorship in the American South: “GSC professor teaches the importance of art as his own work comes under fire,” by Brandee A. Thomas, Gainesville Times.

Librarians interested in intellectual freedom should take note of a case of censorship by copyright lawsuit. Danish artist Nadia Plesner has used an image of a Louis Vuitton handbag in some biting artwork about the genocide in Darfur to show our culpability in not bridging the gap between the tragedy there and our shallow consumerist lives. Louis Vuitton sued her a couple of years ago, and a judged ruled in their favor in January, without giving Plesner a chance to testify in her own defense. You can read about it on her site.

Byron Anderson has updated his “Bibliographic and Web Tools for Alternative Media,” which is published regularly in Counterpoise. Sections include Reference Books/Online Databases; Web Sources; Distributors; Organizations; Small Press/Alternative Media: News, Reviews, Awards, Reprints; and Related works.

Also see Byron’s guide to “Getting Alternative Press Titles into Libraries and Promoting Alternative Presses in the Library.“

Google has added a feature to its advanced search form that allows you to filter results by reading level or add information about a page’s reading level to the information in the results. Reading level is indicated as “basic,” “intermediate,” or “advanced.” Like most of what goes on underneath the Google hood, we aren’t given much information about how reading level is computed.

I am constitutionally against anything that could be construed as “dumbing down,” but I have to confess that I find this feature interesting. Working with first-year students in an academic library I often find myself wishing that we had a way to search bibliographic databases that would provide scholarly acceptable content that the students were actually able to comprehend. Something like this technology could be used in a bibliographic database, although I am sure its application in a reference setting would be potentially awkward and intellectual freedom issues would emerge.

In checking out this feature, I noticed that Google’s advanced search page includes some additions that I would have to call welcome and surprising from a librarian’s standpoint. If you haven’t looked at it for a while you should check it out (including the collapsed features at the bottom).

Christian Caryl has an insightful post on the NYRB blog, “WikiLeaks in the Moral Void.” As he astutely says about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,

In practical terms it seems to boil down to a policy of disclosure for disclosure’s sake. This is what the technology allows, and Assange has merely followed its lead. I don’t see coherently articulated morality, or even immorality, at work here at all; what I see is an amoral, technocratic void.

There have been so many times, historically, that good ends have been served by bringing information to light the government or other organizations wanted to conceal that it can be difficult to see the radical effect that the internet is having on the implications of transparency as a value. Sunshine laws have always built in limitations on disclosure for good reasons, but in popular thinking these limitations haven’t changed the way many people think about transparency as a value per se. Now, in the case of WikiLeaks, it seems that technical tools are realizing that value to an absolute degree. I think librarians who admire Julian Assange as a matter of reflex should stop to consider how our basic framework of values is affected by technology in this area. To think that the world would be a better place if there were total transparency, no distinction between public and private, inside and outside, would, I think, amount to a failure to think things through. Instead of making a hero out of Julian Assange, I think we should study WikiLeaks as an example of the social effects of technology. What does it tell us about how the internet amplifies certain human tendencies as opposed to others? About the effect of the internet on international relations and people’s relationship to the state? Do we know why we react to something like WikiLeaks the way we do, prior to thinking about it?

A conflict over intellectual freedom of potential historical import may be taking shape in China surrounding China’s most famous (globally famous) artist, Ai Weiwei.

Ai Weiwei is politically active as well as being a challenging and innovative artist whose work responds to the contemporary world, so it is not surprising that the Chinese government is nervous about him. Just recently, he was placed under house arrest for refusing to cancel a big party to commemorate the government-ordered demolition of his studio. New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos is blogging about the situation from his home in Beijing. News concerning Ai Weiwei is being covered well at the UK Guardian.

This article feels like another nail in the coffin of what we thought we knew of the past: Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’. Or a ramping-ing up of the general weirdness of the times. Here is the start of the article in the Independent, by Frances Stonor Saunders:

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art – President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.” As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

Leonard Kniffel, editor of American Libraries, the American Library Association’s house publication, write in his blog:

Book burning is the most insidious form of book banning, and just as the American Library Association is preparing to celebrate the freedom to read during Banned Books Week, along comes one Rev. Terry Jones of the 50-member Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. The good reverend’s idea of world outreach is to commemorate the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 with a public burning of the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book.

…

The reverend would do well to use his matches to ignite the pilot light in his brain. Have you ever actually read the Qur’an, Rev. Jones? If you really want illumination, I respectfully suggest you spend Saturday reading instead of burning.

Read more…

The 1980s began the “give ‘em what they want” era of library collection development, when it became irredeemably elitist for librarians to think they occupy some kind of teaching role as selectors and reference librarians for their communities.

In 2010, the war of the populist cultural conservatives against the latté sipping liberal elitists is wearing itself out as Palin and the tea partiers gradually grow too ridiculous to take seriously. (Those on the left who call anyone sexist who calls Palin stupid are only making things worse.) At least that is the hope of this latté sipping librarian whose strategy is to ride it out.

The questions I have are a rhetorical one followed by a philosophical one, going to our idea of our role in society as librarians. First, if one in five Americans believes that Obama is a Muslim, are we obliged to stock one book that claims he is a Muslim for every four that say he is a Christian? Or, to bring geography into the mix, swing the proportion higher or lower according to the community in which we work? Obviously not, but then the real question: On what basis do we claim to know more than our communities? I am looking for a positive answer, along the lines that we are professionals, trained to make selection decisions about books and other resources, that we are in a position of authority regarding what public libraries should contain. If you’re not willing to stand up and make that claim for the profession (at the risk of being called elitist by a political leader and Presidential hopeful who thinks “Americans should refudiate the ground zero mosque”) then what good are we?